Building Linux images for ARM architectures

Want to try your hand at building a Linux package for an embedded device? [SnowBot] decided to give it a try and set out to build Ubuntu for a GumStix. The single-board computer will cost you about $150 to get started, plus a way to connect to the device’s serial port. But once you’ve got your hands on it there is a lot of power in a tiny package.

He’s using the RootStock package to assist in the build. This is a suite of tools that generates the root file system that can be loaded onto an SD card for use with the Gumstix. It’s not quite building from the ground up, but there’s already enough hoops to jump through that this package is a welcomed shortcut.

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30 thoughts on “Building Linux images for ARM architectures”

It looks like he avoided all of the hard work in building a distro. He found a precompiled bootloader+kernel+modules, used a tool that automatically creates a rootfs, and built under Linux on the target to avoid the pain usually associated with cross compiling.

Not that it’s a bad thing… Outside of the long build times I’m glad to see that Ubuntu makes the process easy.

haha, thanks guys. Unfortunately I am still at the stage of learning and playing. Soon I will have a robot driven with a gumstix as its computer. But until then, watch the youtube videos of our other robots being driven with netbooks.

As far as distributions for embedded goes, Gentoo would probably be a better choice as it allows you to set the cflags to -Os to minimize the memory and flash usage. It also allows you to tune it for the specific processor instead of just using the least common denominator.

yeah, when you could have bought the dockstar network adapter for $20, $150+ for a gumstix seems way too much, considering the board size is not that different. I bought two of the dockstar network adapters, one as a simple NAS, and one to put in a robot or something.

@GZ Jeff Doozan was the person behind the usb boot-capable uBoot. He has done tremendous work on the Dockstar.

I will definitely be watching this project and his progress overall on the continued work being done on the dockstar. Unfortunately my only crutch now seems to be setting up the cross-compiler toolchain to roll my own packages. This doc should help tremendously.

both of these use a fairly simple system using the sources supplied by leapfrog. They also include a fairly simple system for installing extra packages, not exactly the most elegant of setups but it does the job.

I miss the time when I could purchase Netgear WGT-634u wireless routers for ~$35 each. These ran OpenWRT beautifully, and included a Mini-PCI slot containing an Atheros 802.11g wireless Mini-PCI card. This card could be swapped out for any number of different Mini-PCI cards that would operate at full PCI bus speed, including VGA adapters, h.264 compression cards, video capture cards, or any other number of high-speed adapters. Of course, much of this can be done with a USB 2.0 port, but I always found the transmission of high frame-rate video to be lacking using USB 2.0, in my opinion…

But really – a Gumstix isn’t a viable choice these days what with as commentors above have said – you can have a BeagleBoard that has a metric crapton more power, a hackable wireless router or NAS, and a hell of a lot better solutions for embedded devices.

Unless you want the actual “holy crap it’s a stick of gum” size, that is.

I have been trying to get any basic linux boot on a
ADE Z228 Development Board, which is running an ARM926J processor.There is a video on the web of someone porting Andriod on the same machine and board

Has anyone tried attempting to port linux and has some tips, it would be helpful for me.

The hack is interesting, it does show a few things I was possible doing wrong…

Bought a Seagate Dockstar for $25, it is 1.2Ghz, so for performance, 1 Dockstar is about 2 Gumstix while as for price, 1 Gumstix is about 6 Dockstars, your choice you can buy $35 Dockstars at Amazon (the $25 ones are gone), or you can accidentally eat your development platform.